Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is the method of gaining traffic by purchasing ads on search engines. It is also called paid search and sometimes referred to as CPC (cost-per-click) or PPC (pay-per-click) marketing, because most search ads are sold on a CPC / PPC basis. Like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it relies on keywords that activate your results into the paid advertising section of the search results page. http://youtube.com/watch?v=-cQxd1gS88s&app=desktop
Your customers, prospects, and partners are the lifeblood of of your business. You need to build your marketing strategy around them. Step 1 of marketing is understanding what your customers want, which can be challenging when you’re dealing with such a diverse audience. This chapter will walk you through (1) the process of building personal connections at scale and (2) crafting customer value propositions that funnel back to ROI for your company.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer programmed algorithms which dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, adding content, doing HTML, and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic. By May 2015, mobile search had surpassed desktop search.[3] In 2015, it was reported that Google is developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature within future products. In response, many brands are beginning to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies.[4]

In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. KinderStart's website was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007 the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend, and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses.[68][69]
Video advertising - This type of advertising in terms of digital/online means are advertisements that play on online videos e.g. YouTube videos. This type of marketing has seen an increase in popularity over time.[50] Online Video Advertising usually consists of three types: Pre-Roll advertisements which play before the video is watched, Mid-Roll advertisements which play during the video, or Post-Roll advertisements which play after the video is watched.[51] Post-roll advertisements were shown to have better brand recognition in relation to the other types, where-as "ad-context congruity/incongruity plays an important role in reinforcing ad memorability".[50] Due to selective attention from viewers, there is the likelihood that the message may not be received.[52] The main advantage of video advertising is that it disrupts the viewing experience of the video and therefore there is a difficulty in attempting to avoid them. How a consumer interacts with online video advertising can come down to three stages: Pre attention, attention, and behavioural decision.[53] These online advertisements give the brand/business options and choices. These consist of length, position, adjacent video content which all directly affect the effectiveness of the produced advertisement time,[50] therefore manipulating these variables will yield different results. Length of the advertisement has shown to affect memorability where-as longer duration resulted in increased brand recognition.[50] This type of advertising, due to its nature of interruption of the viewer, it is likely that the consumer may feel as if their experience is being interrupted or invaded, creating negative perception of the brand.[50] These advertisements are also available to be shared by the viewers, adding to the attractiveness of this platform. Sharing these videos can be equated to the online version of word by mouth marketing, extending number of people reached.[54] Sharing videos creates six different outcomes: these being "pleasure, affection, inclusion, escape, relaxation, and control".[50] As well, videos that have entertainment value are more likely to be shared, yet pleasure is the strongest motivator to pass videos on. Creating a ‘viral’ trend from mass amount of a brands advertisement can maximize the outcome of an online video advert whether it be positive or a negative outcome.
For the most part, the 6-figure, 7-figure, and 8-figure-earners and up are making a large majority of their income by scaling out offers that they control. If you're just starting out, that avenue isn't for you. It only comes over time as you come to understand the field. As Sharpe says, most people first need to get a lay of the land and cruise through the virtual sales landscape before they dive into a massive undertaking like creating their own digital products and sales funnels.
What is ​search engine optimization, then? It's not secrets or tricks — just ranking methodologies to follow in order to help a site that offers value to users beat the competition in search results. Today, you must be committed not just to optimizing your domain, but also to making it a quality site that attracts links naturally and is worthy of ranking. http://youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata&v=tAcs7qzygT4
Before you can create YouTube video ads as part of your marketing campaign, you must link your AdWords account to your YouTube account. Then you’ll need to import your video into AdWords - or create it if it doesn’t already exist. Once you upload the video, you’ll be able to choose a thumbnail and write some appealing ad text to encourage viewers to watch. The next step is to choose your target audience and budget. Provide some billing information, and you’re ready to run your first video ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAcs7qzygT4&feature=kp
4. The facets of content marketing. Though content marketing can be treated as a distinct strategy, I see it as a necessary element of the SEO process. Only by developing high-quality content over time will you be able to optimize for your target keywords, build your site’s authority, and curate a loyal recurring audience. You should know the basics, at the very least, before proceeding with other components of SEO.
Before you can create YouTube video ads as part of your marketing campaign, you must link your AdWords account to your YouTube account. Then you’ll need to import your video into AdWords - or create it if it doesn’t already exist. Once you upload the video, you’ll be able to choose a thumbnail and write some appealing ad text to encourage viewers to watch. The next step is to choose your target audience and budget. Provide some billing information, and you’re ready to run your first video ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAcs7qzygT4&feature=kp

Sharpe says that you shouldn't dive into internet marketing until you decide on a niche and figure out what you're passionate about. Do you want to join the make-money-online (MMO) niche? Or do you want to engage in another niche? For example, you could sell products or online courses about blogging or search engine optimization or anything else for that matter. Keep in mind that whatever you're selling, whatever niche you're in, that you need to embed yourself there deeply.

Our online Professional Diploma in Social Media Marketing teaches you the best practices for marketing through YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. It includes 30 hours of in-depth lectures taught by industry experts and will equip you with all the skills and knowledge you need to plan, build and measure effective social media strategies. Find out more here.
Don’t cry. That’s what a video marketing platform is for; specifically, one like Vidyard that integrates with YouTube. Your YouTube presence can drive viewers to your site, where they’ll engage with you further. Through the platform, you can gain analytics on who’s watching what, for how long, and what that means for your content, and for your bottom line. It’s easy, too. Uploading, editing, distributing, and managing videos is a snap all from one central location.
They also influence how search engines determine relevance between a keyword, an ad, and the webpage the ad directs people to—key factors in determining a Quality Score. “Quality Score is primarily a measure of relevance, and improving keyword Quality Score is a matter of structuring your PPC campaigns into small, well-organized, tightly knit groups of keywords,” said WordStream, a PPC software company.
For the most part, the 6-figure, 7-figure, and 8-figure-earners and up are making a large majority of their income by scaling out offers that they control. If you're just starting out, that avenue isn't for you. It only comes over time as you come to understand the field. As Sharpe says, most people first need to get a lay of the land and cruise through the virtual sales landscape before they dive into a massive undertaking like creating their own digital products and sales funnels.
Our backgrounds are as diverse as they come, bringing knowledge and expertise in business, finance, search marketing, analytics, PR, content creation, creative, and more. Our leadership team is comprised of successful entrepreneurs, business executives, athletes, military combat veterans, and marketing experts. The Executives, Directors, and Managers at IMI are all well-respected thought leaders in the space and are the driving force behind the company’s ongoing success and growth.
Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO of HubSpotsays it best: “The worst thing to do is make a completely boring video. Videos that are pure marketing puff pieces don’t spread.” So what do your audience want instead? They want to laugh, they want to feel enlightened, they want to be pulled out of their boring 9 to 5s and forget about their realities. HubSpot don’t take themselves too seriously – Dharmesh insists that humour works well for their video marketing campaigns.
SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective like paid advertising through pay per click (PPC) campaigns, depending on the site operator's goals. Search engine marketing (SEM), is practice of designing, running, and optimizing search engine ad campaigns.[54] Its difference from SEO is most simply depicted as the difference between paid and unpaid priority ranking in search results. Its purpose regards prominence more so than relevance; website developers should regard SEM with the utmost importance with consideration to visibility as most navigate to the primary listings of their search.[55] A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's conversion rate.[56] In November 2015, Google released a full 160 page version of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public,[57] which now shows a shift in their focus towards "usefulness" and mobile search. In recent years the mobile market has exploded, overtaking the use of desktops as shown in by StatCounter in October 2016 where they analysed 2.5 million websites and 51.3% of the pages were loaded by a mobile device [58]. Google has been one of the companies that have utilised the popularity of mobile usage by encouraging websites to use their Google Search Console, the Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows companies to measure up their website to the search engine results and how user-friendly it is.
By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This meant moving away from heavy reliance on term density to a more holistic process for scoring semantic signals.[13] Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, poor quality or irrelevant search results could lead users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web was created to bring together practitioners and researchers concerned with search engine optimization and related topics.[14]

Gaining Google's trust doesn't happen overnight. It takes time. Think about building up your relationship with anyone. The longer you know that person, the more likely that trust will solidify. So, the reasoning is, that if Google just met you, it's going to have a hard time trusting you. If you want Google to trust you, you have to get other people that Google already trusts, to vouch for you. This is also known as link-building.

Keyword analysis. From nomination, further identify a targeted list of key­words and phrases. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine an indicative number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each key­word. Prioritize keywords and phrases, plurals, singulars and misspellings. (If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it). Please note that Google will try to correct the term when searching, so use this with care.
In this new world of digital transparency brands have to be very thoughtful in how they engage with current and potential customers. Consumers have an endless amount of data at their fingertips especially through social media channels, rating and review sites, blogs, and more. Unless brands actively engage in these conversations they lose the opportunity for helping guide their brand message and addressing customer concerns.

Video can also provide social proof for your product or service. According to WebDam, customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing at 89%. When creating video success stories focus on the story of your customer and the success he/she achieved from using your product/service. This nifty question template from Copyblogger will help you create awesome and human-focused video and written testimonials.

Before your start filming, set a music budget and research your local copyright laws. Copyright law can be very difficult to decipher, especially when you’re dealing with digital content. Bottom line: Most music isn’t free. If you use another artist’s music without permission or proper licensing, you risk video removal and legal action. In order to avoid copyright infringement, you’ll need to find royalty free tunes or pay a composer to create an original score. Royalty free songs aren’t free to use; they’re quality songs available for a single flat fee. This means you don’t have to worry about paying additional licensing fees or royalties in the future. YouTube, Pond5, and PremiumBeat are all great sites to find royalty free music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAcs7qzygT4&app=m
In addition to giving you insight into the search volume and competition level of keywords, most keyword research tools will also give you detailed information about the average or current estimated CPC for particular keywords are. This is particularly important for businesses with smaller ad budgets and this feature allows you to predict whether certain keywords will be truly beneficial to your ad campaigns or if they’ll cost too much.

Gaining Google's trust doesn't happen overnight. It takes time. Think about building up your relationship with anyone. The longer you know that person, the more likely that trust will solidify. So, the reasoning is, that if Google just met you, it's going to have a hard time trusting you. If you want Google to trust you, you have to get other people that Google already trusts, to vouch for you. This is also known as link-building. http://m.youtu.be/-cQxd1gS88s

In 2007, U.S. advertisers spent US $24.6 billion on search engine marketing.[3] In Q2 2015, Google (73.7%) and the Yahoo/Bing (26.3%) partnership accounted for almost 100% of U.S. search engine spend.[4] As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing.[5] Managing search campaigns is either done directly with the SEM vendor or through an SEM tool provider. It may also be self-serve or through an advertising agency. As of October 2016, Google leads the global search engine market with a market share of 89.3%. Bing comes second with a market share of 4.36%, Yahoo comes third with a market share of 3.3%, and Chinese search engine Baidu is fourth globally with a share of about 0.68%.[6]
There is limited real estate for the top positions in organic search results. With the amount of content on the web today and the number of competitors you have, it can be hard to get in a top position, even despite your best efforts. If you’re a new business or an existing one trying to build your online presence, SEM/PPC advertising can get you in front of highly targeted customers.
Moreover: if you don’t have to, don’t change your URLs. Even if your URLs aren’t “pretty,” if you don’t feel as though they’re negatively impacting users and your business in general, don’t change them to be more keyword focused for “better SEO.” If you do have to change your URL structure, make sure to use the proper (301 permanent) type of redirect. This is a common mistake businesses make when they redesign their websites.

For the most part, the 6-figure, 7-figure, and 8-figure-earners and up are making a large majority of their income by scaling out offers that they control. If you're just starting out, that avenue isn't for you. It only comes over time as you come to understand the field. As Sharpe says, most people first need to get a lay of the land and cruise through the virtual sales landscape before they dive into a massive undertaking like creating their own digital products and sales funnels.

First and foremost, when it comes to marketing anything online, it's important to understand how money is made and earned. In my phone call with Sharpe, he identified several items that were well worth mentioning. Once you understand where the money comes from and how the industry works, you can then better understand how best to position yourself and your offer so that you can reap the benefits of the making-money-while-you-sleep industry.
4. The facets of content marketing. Though content marketing can be treated as a distinct strategy, I see it as a necessary element of the SEO process. Only by developing high-quality content over time will you be able to optimize for your target keywords, build your site’s authority, and curate a loyal recurring audience. You should know the basics, at the very least, before proceeding with other components of SEO. https://youtube.com/watch?v=-cQxd1gS88s
Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Search Console, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. https://youtube.com/v/-cQxd1gS88s?version=3
Before online marketing channels emerged, the cost to market products or services was often prohibitively expensive, and traditionally difficult to measure. Think of national television ad campaigns, which are measured through consumer focus groups to determine levels of brand awareness. These methods are also not well-suited to controlled experimentation. Today, anyone with an online business (as well as most offline businesses) can participate in online marketing by creating a website and building customer acquisition campaigns at little to no cost. Those marketing products and services also have the ability to experiment with optimization to fine-tune their campaigns’ efficiency and ROI.
The fact is, YouTube is the second biggest search engine, next to Google. Yet in a recent study, 87% of marketers said they planned on placing video ads on Facebook, compared with 81.5% on YouTube. Don’t make the mistake of valuing one over the other, even with fancy numbers like Facebook’s 4 billion video views: after all, Facebook videos autoplay, so any view that lasts at least 3 seconds is counted as a full view. 4 billion is an impressive number no matter how you look at it, but keep the whole story in mind.

One of the best ways to improve the look of your video is to include b-roll. B-roll is the supplementary footage included as a cutaway. This might include shots of a customer service rep talking on a phone, a designer editing your website, visuals of your office, or even screenshots of your product. The key with b-roll is to make sure each and every piece enhances the story.

The third and final stage requires the firm to set a budget and management systems; these must be measurable touchpoints, such as audience reached across all digital platforms. Furthermore, marketers must ensure the budget and management systems are integrating the paid, owned and earned media of the company.[67] The Action and final stage of planning also requires the company to set in place measurable content creation e.g. oral, visual or written online media.[68]

Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs). Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cQxd1gS88s&feature=kp
By now, you've likely seen all the "gurus" in your Facebook feed. Some of them are more popular than others. What you'll notice is that the ads you see that have the highest views and engagement are normally the most successful. Use a site like Similar Web to study those ads and see what they're doing. Join their lists and embed yourself in their funnels. That's an important part of the process so that you can replicate and reverse engineer what the most successful marketers are doing.

On April 24, 2012 many started to see that Google has started to penalize companies that are buying links for the purpose of passing off the rank. The Google Update was called Penguin. Since then, there have been several different Penguin/Panda updates rolled out by Google. SEM has, however, nothing to do with link buying and focuses on organic SEO and PPC management. As of October 20, 2014 Google has released three official revisions of their Penguin Update.

Although online marketing creates many opportunities for businesses to grow their presence via the Internet and build their audiences, there are also inherent challenges with these methods of marketing. First, the marketing can become impersonal, due to the virtual nature of message and content delivery to a desired audience. Marketers must inform their strategy for online marketing with a strong understanding of their customer’s needs and preferences. Techniques like surveys, user testing, and in-person conversations can be used for this purpose.

By creating information-dense, accessible, easy-to-interact-with video content, brands can develop a substantial online following and promote customer recall. For an example of a company that’s done this particularly well, consider Headspace, a meditation app that became a $250 million business. The app offers multiple levels of meditation, employing gamification to increase engagement. Users must complete and master each meditation level before advancing. Most sessions are in video format, beautifully crafted with illustrations and layouts true to the brand. It is elegant, consistent and engaging, heavily relying on video. http://youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tAcs7qzygT4

In 2013, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals held in Lens.com, Inc. v. 1-800 Contacts, Inc. that online contact lens seller Lens.com did not commit trademark infringement when it purchased search advertisements using competitor 1-800 Contacts' federally registered 1800 CONTACTS trademark as a keyword. In August 2016, the Federal Trade Commission filed an administrative complaint against 1-800 Contacts alleging, among other things, that its trademark enforcement practices in the search engine marketing space have unreasonably restrained competition in violation of the FTC Act. 1-800 Contacts has denied all wrongdoing and is scheduled to appear before an FTC administrative law judge in April 2017.[29]

Internet marketing, or online marketing, refers to advertising and marketing efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales via electronic commerce, in addition to sales leads from websites or emails. Internet marketing and online advertising efforts are typically used in conjunction with traditional types of advertising such as radio, television, newspapers and magazines.

Conversion rate optimization is still possibly one of the most underutilized but critical functions of digital marketing. Every element of digital marketing is useless without considering conversion rates. This goes for SEO, SEM, Social Media, Email, and Display. The power of your SEO rankings are only as good as your click through rates and your traffic is only valuable of your website and landing pages foster some type of “action.” Why spend all the time and energy driving traffic through multiple different channels if you are not willing to spend the time and energy on conversion optimization? Yet many brands and agencies still put less emphasis on this crucial piece of the puzzle.
While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another meta HTML element that can be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description may not always show, but if you have a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you can greatly increase traffic. (Remember: showing up in search results is just the first step! You still need to get searchers to come to your site, and then actually take the action you want.)
As digital marketing continues to grow and develop, brands take great advantage of using technology and the Internet as a successful way to communicate with its clients and allows them to increase the reach of who they can interact with and how they go about doing so,.[2] There are however disadvantages that are not commonly looked into due to how much a business relies on it. It is important for marketers to take into consideration both advantages and disadvantages of digital marketing when considering their marketing strategy and business goals.
There are also a few more similarities. All of these marketing methods are measurable to an extent never seen in any other media. Every click can be measured – where and when it came – and followed through to the conversion, the sale and the lifetime customer value. This feedback loop creates optimization opportunities that can create huge incremental improvements in your SEM campaigns.

Videos allow you to increase the time spent by visitors on your site. Thus, longer exposure builds trust and signals search engines that your site has good content. Moovly gives us whopping statistics: You’re 53 times more likely show up first on Google if you have a video embedded on your website. Since Google now owns YouTube, there has been a significant increase in how much videos affect your search engine rank.

The truth? Today, rising above the noise and achieving any semblance of visibility has become a monumental undertaking. While we might prevail at searching, we fail at being found. How are we supposed to get notice while swimming in a sea of misinformation and disinformation? We've become immersed in this guru gauntlet where one expert after another is attempting to teach us how we can get the proverbial word out about our businesses and achieve visibility to drive more leads and sales, but we all still seem to be lost.

Amir runs Apricot, an agency that creates video campaigns stimulating client growth. Prior to launching the business, he worked in film distribution, devising marketing strategies for both cinematic and straight to DVD releases. Away from Apricot, he’s coached on Seth Godin’s altMBA program, reads avidly, and studies persuasion and the related fields in depth. Follow Amir on Twitter at @apricot_amir.

We help clients increase their organic search traffic by using the latest best practices and most ethical and fully-integrated search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Since 1999, we've partnered with many brands and executed campaigns for over 1,000 websites, helping them dominate in even highly competitive industries, via capturing placements that maximize impressions and traffic. https://www.youtube.com/v/-cQxd1gS88s&feature=youtu.be
Some brands and influencers have found an incredible niche on YouTube. YouTube personalities Casey Neistat and Amy Schmittauer are awesome examples of influencers with a loyal following while GoPro is the Cinderella story of brands making it big. Those, along with countless others, have discovered a formula for YouTube success and it has worked well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=-cQxd1gS88s
The ad auction process takes place every single time someone enters a search query into Google. To be entered into the ad auction, advertisers identify keywords they want to bid on, and state how much they are willing to spend (per click) to have their ads appear alongside results relating to those keywords. If Google determines that the keywords you have bid on are contained within a user’s search query, your ads are entered into the ad auction.

Baseline ranking assessment. You need to understand where you are now in order to accurately assess your future rankings. Keep a simple Excel sheet to start the process. Check weekly to begin. As you get more comfortable, check every 30 to 45 days. You should see improvements in website traffic, a key indicator of progress for your keywords. Some optimizers will say that rankings are dead. Yes, traffic and conversions are more important, but we use rankings as an indicator.

2. Domain authority and page authority. Next, you should learn about domain authority and page authority, and how they predict your site’s search rankings. Here’s the basic idea; your site’s domain authority is a proprietary score, provided by Moz, of how “trustworthy” your domain is. It’s calculated based on the quantity and quality of inbound links to your website. The higher it is, the higher all your pages across your domain are likely to rank in organic search results. Page authority is very similar, but page-specific, and you can use it to engineer a link architecture that strategically favors some of your pages over others. Authority depends on the authority and volume of inbound links.
And finally, the other really important bucket is authority. Google wants to show sites that are popular. If they can show the most popular t-shirt seller to people looking to buy t-shirts online, that’s the site they want to show. So you have to convince Google - send them signals that your site is the most popular site for the kind of t-shirts that you sell. Fill this bucket by building a fan base. Build a social network, get people to link to you, get people to share your t-shirt pages on their social network saying ‘I want this!’, get people to comment, leave testimonials, show pictures of themselves wearing the product or using the product, Create a fan-base and then rally them to link to you and talk about you. That’s how you prove to Google that you are trustworthy and authoritative. http://youtu.be/-cQxd1gS88s
That doesn't mean you won't make any money at the outset. No, as long as you configure the right free offer to capture those all-important email addresses on your squeeze pages, and you build a great value chain with excellent sales funnels, you'll succeed. If all that sounds confusing to you, don't worry, you'll learn over time. That's what internet marketing is all about. It's a constant and never-ending education into an oftentimes-convoluted field filled with less-than-scrupulous individuals. http://y2u.be/tAcs7qzygT4